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OPINION

Raise minimum wage to help erase poverty

I started working in restaurants when I was 19. While filling out my application, I imagined how much money I was probably going to make. If I just waited on a hundred tables a night — even if each of those tables only left me $2 — I could easily make $1,000 a week. Multiply that by, let’s say, 50 weeks a year, and I could be making more in a year than my mother did teaching. And that was just assuming the bare minimum, I was sure.

It turned out that 100 tables a night was a gross overestimation. Over the seven years I waited tables in different restaurants, I never made enough to even get me over the poverty line. Earning $4.35 an hour as the tipped minimum wage, I was told I was responsible for making up the difference between that wage and the federal minimum wage of $7.25 with tips (in reality, employers are legally responsible for making up this difference if wait staff’s tips don’t). If people didn’t feel like tipping, I earned sub-minimum wages. I was always just scraping by. Paying all of my bills on time was impossible. In order to pay one of them, I would have to neglect another, and then the late fees would put me even further behind. I wasn’t always able to buy groceries, and when I was, they were rarely healthy. Fresh fruits and vegetables were too expensive.

I always assumed it was something I would get past, something I was supposed to experience while I worked my way through school. I’ve since graduated, though, and I’ve seen that in reality, low wages are trapping millions of full-time workers in permanent debt — including college graduates like me who pay the highest tuition in history while seeking jobs in the most unequal economy since the Great Depression.

There is a false sense of glamor in that narrative of the poor college student or the starving artist. In one sense, it allows us to ignore the very real issues associated with growing inequality and poverty, writing them off as temporary problems that will be solved with education and hard work. It lulls us into thinking poverty is a rite of passage — something everyone should go through and will come out of. It takes the responsibility off of policymakers who have failed to act and corporations who are choosing to profit from low wages, and puts it on workers who are often already working more than anyone should have to.

In another sense, this narrative doesn’t paint a full picture of what’s happening in our country. It doesn’t tell the story of the mothers and fathers who work two and three minimum wage jobs just to try to feed and clothe their children. It doesn’t tell the story of the senior citizens who were supposed to be able to retire, but never made enough money. It doesn’t tell the story of immigrants educated in other countries who aren’t given the opportunity to find work in their fields in the U.S.

We have the ability to change this narrative. Workers who live the reality of hard work at low pay are ready to be heard: we need a raise to the $15 an hour it actually takes to survive. Like people all over the country, we know we can’t wait for Congress or our state Legislature to act. We are calling on local elected officials to enact a $15 an hour minimum wage right here in our community. It is possible to reverse the downward slide of wages and jumpstart our local economy. Letting go of our romantic illusions about low-wage work is just the first step.

Katie Wilson is a Center for Worker Justice board member and Worker Justice Committee co-chair.